Morning Eye Candy: Settling In
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on July 6 2013, by Matt Newman
The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden doesn’t “quit” in the summer. It just settles in.
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Plant Talk
Inside The New York Botanical Garden
This Weekend: Summer’s Green
Posted in Programs and Events on July 5 2013, by Matt Newman
I hope everyone had a safe, colorful Independence Day! Our fireworks are still going, so to speak (these flowers last longer than your average bottle rocket). And we’re not wasting any time leaping into this “sort of” long weekend, either, with a packed schedule of Wild Medicine activities, music, dance, and gardening demos.
With Commedia dell’Arte lilting through the Renaissance in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and all things onions and garlic taking over the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden for Sweet & Stinky, your kids won’t be at a loss for entertainment. Meanwhile, join us in the Home Gardening Center on Saturday or Sunday for Herbal Delights, our latest gardening demonstration highlighting the stack of appetizing ways you can make herbs the workhorse of your garden. You can even continue your edible education back in the Family Garden with one of our daily cooking demonstrations using fresh-picked ingredients.
We’ll be outside all weekend, enjoying the fruits of summer, so joining us wouldn’t be a bad idea! Check out the events below.
Morning Eye Candy: Colorburst
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on July 5 2013, by Matt Newman
It’s July 5 and the fireworks are done with. Hopefully your eyes have readjusted to things that aren’t bursting into rainbow-colored sparks, and all those hot dogs will work themselves off in the course of the day. Anyway, I figured you could use some daylilies—because who doesn’t want more things that go ‘boom,’ figuratively speaking?
[Not a valid template]Morning Eye Candy: Rockets’ Red Glare
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on July 4 2013, by Matt Newman
Francis Scott Key may never have penned “the rockets’ pink glare,” but if he had, he’d be covered on the imagery front. Happy Independence Day, everyone! The NYBG is open today, so don’t hesitate to join us for your pre-fireworks adventures.
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Botanical Fireworks
Posted in Gardens and Collections on July 3 2013, by Thomas Andres
Thomas Andres is an Honorary Research Associate with The New York Botanical Garden.
This Fourth of July, remember to look around you for pyrotechnics in the Garden. I don’t mean to suggest there will be literal fireworks at your feet, of course. Perhaps the closest a plant comes to that is the lowly clubmoss (Lycopodium sp.), which is actually a fern ally and not a true moss. In the fall, gathered spores from clubmoss are highly flammable and have been used for generations to make flash powder. Today you may only see it used by magicians, but it was once popular in early photography as a rudimentary flash for large format cameras, not to mention its use in actual fireworks.
The pyrotechnics I am talking about are the plants that bear a resemblance to our favorite fireworks in various ways. Some even have names that suggest this, such as ‘Giant Sunburst’, firecracker flower, flaming sword, and torch lily. They have the advantage over real fireworks by making a show in the daytime with a much longer-lasting display, making them much easier to photograph. They are also considerably more diverse, and I’d say more beautiful, albeit without the bang.
Morning Eye Candy: Farm-Fresh
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on July 3 2013, by Matt Newman
It’s Wednesday. Parking is free for Greenmarket shoppers, as is Grounds Admission. And there are potential soup ingredients waiting. What other motivation do you need?
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
This Week at the Greenmarket: July Harvests
Posted in Programs and Events on July 2 2013, by Matt Newman
Potatoes for mashing, strawberries for snacking, carrots for crunching, garlic for…well, anything you can feasibly put it in shy of ice cream. We’re into week three of the Greenmarket this Wednesday, and things are only ramping up (except the actual ramps—those oniony wonders are more of an April thing) as the summer matures. Last week saw a big focus on summer squash, and while we’re likely to see more of that this week, the start of July traditionally sounds the trumpet for a bunch of other harvests—whether they’re beginning or ending.
Cherries are commonly a July thing, but we’ve been seeing them for a couple of weeks now, so plan to pick up a few hefty handfuls while you’re here. This month also marks the beginning of the fresh potato harvest at large, and the tail end of outdoor-grown rhubarb in our area. Peppers and tomatoes will be coming into vogue from here on out, along with blueberries, peaches, plums, and raspberries, so err on the side of caution and think about bringing your big produce bag in the coming weeks. It’ll be one of your better decisions.
Oh, and keep in mind this is just a tentative schedule—with the weather as unpredictable as it’s been over the last year, the harvests rarely have a cut and dry beginning or end. We just do our best to predict. I’ve got another recipe from the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden for you, so head below for that, and we’ll see you at the Greenmarket tomorrow!
Garden Moments
Posted in Gardening Tips, Gardens and Collections on July 2 2013, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education.
I often have visitors tell me that they love perennials, but their big challenge as gardeners is finding combinations that make it easy to synchronize bloom times. This is a real challenge particularly when the desire to create appealing plant partners meets a wish to provide multi-seasonal interest in the garden.
Annuals are an easy way to ensure season-long color, but they often lack the textures, stature, and architectural interest that perennials supply. In my walks around the Garden this year I have found two “garden moments” worth sharing—one serendipitous, the other planned. They are instructive examples in creating satisfying designs with limited plant palettes in your garden.
A few years ago, on a low stone wall in the Home Gardening Center, I planted a climbing hydrangea (Schizophragma hydrangeoides ‘Moonlight’). The climbing hydrangea is a woody vine that has blue-green, heart-shaped leaves and creamy white lace-cap flowers. It has stretched itself happily over the stone wall and filled in nicely.
Since the vine wants to crawl on the stone wall we needed to fill the space below, by its feet, and along the edge of the border. Lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) seemed like a logical choice. This perennial only grows 12-18” tall and forms a nice clump, with large, scalloped, light-green to blue-green foliage. Furthermore, lady’s mantle flowers alongside the climbing hydrangea in June, producing clusters of showy chartreuse flowers.
Morning Eye Candy: Quenched
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on July 2 2013, by Matt Newman
Consider the summer heat beat. We had our first Wild Medicine Cocktail Evening & Summer Concert last Thursday night, and while you won’t see the Yvette Cup on our tables for the next event on July 18, we’ll certainly have something just as quenching and unique. Tickets are up and going out the door as we speak—don’t miss out!
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Will the Real Elizabeth Blackwell Please Stand Up?
Posted in Around the Garden, Exhibitions, From the Library, People on July 1 2013, by Joyce Newman
Who is Elizabeth Blackwell? If you Google the name, you’ll see that in 1849 she was the first woman to receive a U.S. medical degree, opening the profession to women. But look again. An Englishwoman with the same name was also the first woman to create the illustrated medical text, A Curious Herbal (at right), which was published in 1737, and she too had a huge impact on the practice of medicine.
The extraordinary story of this talented Englishwoman and botanical artist, Elizabeth Blackwell (c. 1700-1758), is part of the Herbals exhibit now on display in the Rondina and LoFaro Gallery of the NYBG’s Mertz Library.
Blackwell’s illustrations deeply impressed many English physicians, botanists, and apothecaries in mid-18th century London where the tradition of the herbal endured longer than it did on the continent. In England the herbals were a close second to the Bible in popularity. And Blackwell’s work was not only unprecedented for a woman of her time, but revealed the grim circumstances she faced as a wife and mother.
Her free-wheeling husband, Alexander, who practiced as a physician, was in debtor’s prison due to a failed, shady business operation. So Elizabeth was desperate to earn money to support her young child and to get him released.